Ashes to Ashes

It is a fiercely cold day with a northerly wind howling through the pine trees outside this window.  A long spell of frigid temperatures is moving in tonight, so - naturally - some archaic instinct is pulsing strong in my mind, and I have been hard at work cutting, gathering, and splitting enough wood to make it one more week.  That has become my rhythm:  one week of heat at a time, a dangerous game I'm playing - driven both by my desire to be done with winter and with my unpreparedness for it in the first place.  

Motivated by the promise of heat streaming out of the floor vents, I took my chainsaw back into the in-law's woods today where a massive section of red oak had fallen to the ground across a hiking path.  And, nearby, lay another nice section of cherry.  The work of earlier fierce winds had done their tasks, pulling from the trees these key pieces.  They lay half buried beneath leaves, the presence of fungi on their bark the evidence of earth's decay already at work.  Despite a few soft spots, though, these were valuable finds.  One full tank of gas and about an hour in the woods with Ada gave me more than enough wood to try and carry out.  The cherry alone nearly filled up the back of my truck's bed, and - besides - I'm still holding out hope this will be the last of the truly frigid weather.

Cutting, gathering, and splitting wood always tears my body down.  Invariably, I take two or three Tylenol after it's all done, and tonight is no different, the muscles in my lower and mid back protesting from their overexertion and my poor lifting technique.  Yesterday, it was the same as I tried to split the rest of what was a small pile of wood in our yard.  They were large chunks, and many required not just the splitting maul, but also a wedge.  It was hard work, which explains why I quickly got rid of my jacket, placing it on top of the wood burner.  I didn't imagine the job taking that long, but dusk quickly turned to night, and I was still pounding away on the logs before me.  Thoroughly exhausted and ready for a few of those Tylenol, I went back to the wood burner to retrieve my coat.  Strangely, as I lifted it from the top, I noticed a bright orange glowing within it, mystified for a few brief seconds.  Then, it hit me.  My coat was on fire.  I dropped it on the ground and proceeded to stomp on it with my heavy boots, thinking it just a small ember.  But, still the glowing orange persisted.  I stomped for several more seconds, picked up the coat, and noticed a rim of burning, bright orange now with an even larger diameter.  That was that.  The fire was pretty much out, but the damage was extensive, a hole the size of a softball on the back left shoulder.  It isn't my nicest coat, but it is my best one for doing work outside.  

Joe and Lisa dropped by later on this afternoon to pass along some Valentine's candy for the kids.  They stayed in their Jeep as we told them the story of the coat incident near Ada's doghouse - myself wrapped only by a thick Patagonia fleece in the place of my more trustworthy field jacket.  Joe wondered if Lisa remembered that time when all they found of a coat was the zipper!  Apparently, I've still got something to salvage.  

We've got enough to get by ... for now ... unless it gets truly cold.  But, that's how I tend to operate in this season of winter:  eeking by and always looking for when I can put the winter coat away for good.

~Wes

Midlife

I don't know what to make of it,
         or where to turn.
Depletion and disjointedness:
       the indexes of middle-age.

These too:
       The tired eyes.  The over-indulged belly.
The limitations felt and no longer trespassed:
       Weak knees, aching backs.
The first failings of the memory -
               a name
          that tumbles
               like a marble inside my mouth and fails
                      to fall out.
All proof the tide has turned,
         and will not go back.

All that is left is
     the denouement:
             The other side of possibility;
        foggy and confused;
                 the facing of sin
                      no longer as enemy to be vanquished,
        but the steady presence,
                      the partner sitting on the sofa across the room,
                           arms folded,
                      knowing and fully known;
                           and despite my protests,
               now part of me in ways I cannot know.

So infected, I come to see,
my struggles not will make me free.

Marked as I am, there is only
        the waiting now.
   No commodity can save me.
   No move to a nicer neighborhood.
   No putting my kids in the right schools.
   No resolutions.
   No new job.

No mortal help will walk into the room,
            only what might come by transfiguration,
    and grace,
          like celestial heralds under the cold, open sky.

Only the possibility of a greater power,
            lifting up within and beneath my bones,
                   of a story tied deep into the fabric of creation,
           Apocalypic tales
                   dancing in old men's heads
           Strange visions
                   of risings,
                   and glorious tellings
                   beyond all hope,
          that second life
          that will not wane
               nor tumble
                    nor be snuffed.
Only life,
        complete and full.

And How Do You Go Back?

From time to time, I turn to the novels of Wendell Berry.  It's habit of pleasure, but also of guidance - an opportunity to measure my life against a vision of America Mr. Berry presents that seems both entirely foreign to me and entirely attractive.  

Yesterday, I turned to Hannah Coulter.  The title itself is fairly misleading.  It has to do with a fictional girl turned woman in the made up small town of Port William, Kentucy in those years before and after World War II.  However, as Mr. Berry is like to say, the story is of all of one piece with a whole host of stories.  Hannah Coulter's story is inevitably tied to the Feltner family, the Catlett family and a dozen other families that make up the small town.  He cannot tell hers without touching a strand of an intricate and beautiful web that is moved in whole.

Those of you who have read Wendell Berry know his dominant theme in all of his stories is community:  both the strength of the fabric prevalent throughout America in small towns once upon a time and now as threadbare as quilts from a lost generation.  You know the strength of his novels are in his ability to make this world come alive, and his weakness as an author is when he idealizes this whole and tightly knit world too strongly, making it seem too much an Eden born again.  Surely, I can't help but argue, things were never that perfect, that whole, that seemingly good.  And if there was a time when communal life existed in such a way, it only increases my melancholy.

My dad tells me about his childhood in little Amboy, Indiana.  I get the sense from his memories there truly was a wholeness there.  Surely, if you were to visit Amboy today, you would see it as a dead town, an isolated desert, one of hundreds lying off some road in an Indiana county.  But it allowed my dad to have an identity through relationship, through family.  It allowed him to be the boy in the "Kendall & Son" service station.  It allowed him to play basketball with the neighbor boys under the park lights.  It held him within a fabric, and I know his heart is still drawn to those memories.

I understand, then, why Wendell Berry writes his Port William stories - resurrecting the older ways when home and economy were not enemies at war but faithful and necessary partners.  

We are so far, though, from that land of Port William imagined by Wendell Berry, about as far now as my dad is from the Amboy, Indiana of his youth.  

Yesterday, I made my way back up to my own hometown that I eventually left.  As I did, I stopped at a Dick's Sporting Goods store just south of the place I grew up, one of the large commercial centers built solely to house the products of a goods & services economy.  There was, of course, nothing communal or local or domestic about the place, and could just as easily have been found near our old apartment in Pasadena, California as it was near Zionsville.  Not ten miles from where I grew up, I entered a vacuous building filled with more goods and items any small town would ever need in its lifetime, and there I stood roaming through it feeling both vacant and alone.  When I finally found what I was looking for - gloves for my kids - and found my way back again to the check-out registers, I found fifteen or so perfect strangers, all of us alike in our motivations as consumers and yet completely unknown from one another.  I made eye contact accidentally with a woman, and then turned my gaze quickly downward, intuiting that I had broken some unspoken rule of this new world.  It is a world of technology, mechanization and accessibility, and it seems the strangest at those points when we are forced into some type of relational act:  the awkward waiting in line behind or beside someone, the point when the exchange has to take place between the employee and the customer.  It is no secret that plans are already being put into place to eliminate this last bit of humanity in the whole exchange.  We can already get pretty much anything we need or want without any real sort of community.  For some things we don't need any at all, and the only question is whether this is at all healthy or sustainable environmentally, let alone what God has decreed.

But, this is my problem:  I have no clue how to return to that world Mr. Berry paints for us.  It seems a reality too much squandered and abused.  It seems a way of life that has vanished, a native language dead without any ancestors.  I don't even know if it ever was a reality, and that increases my melancholy.

How do you build community when you are - after all - a child of this autonomous world?  How do you begin to forge a life of "membership" unto one another and unto the whole of a place?  What does that look like?  And will my wife and I truly be partners in our home and life together unless we truly share some common work?  

Finally, I am left to wonder what is worse.  To be held, even choked perhaps, by the closeness of the small town America of yesteryear, a place plagued by buried secrets and systems of inequality like the Jim Crow South of Wendell Berry novels?  Or, is it better to live and be so able to freely move in this new modern, global world that we must face these new enemies that are so clearly the ills of independence:  isolation, anxiety, fear?

Mr. Berry, of course, can't answer that question for us.  He suggests many times that Port William and little Amboy, Indiana, never will be the same.  And that if they do appear again, it will be when God's Kingdom itself comes in full, or - as he says - Port William descends out of the heavens as the new creation, and we are waiting for it like a bride awaits the bridegroom.  That, I suppose, is why I lean in that direction myself with faith and with hope.

Wes 

Early Fall

I remember when we painted these walls.  Going on four plus years now.  The room was littered with dry wall mud that had been carelessly splattered upon the old wooden floor boards.  The old trim around the windows was dark and archaic.  It seemed a relic from a distant era:  the time of horse-drawn carriages and grand oil paintings brought over from the old world.  

I really didn't want to spend my evenings painting this old house.  I was just getting settled in at the church, and after spending the days in town I wanted to be able to be home with my family.  The trouble was my family was living in the basement of my in-laws, a situation that was not sustainable for any of us.  And through some strange means of transference, it was made known to me that I would go in the evening to finish whatever needed to be done in order for my wife and two kids to move in with me come the spring time of 2009.  

I wore old Columbia hiking paints and thermal long-sleeve shirts as I worked, the bright lights of spotlights shining upon the walls.  To those passing by my nocturnal work, I surely must have seemed a deranged loner, or perhaps an eccentric artistic type.  I could care less what I looked like, though.  I worked in the audio isolation of my iPod, kept company by the great American voices rock and blues.  I fell in love with BB King during those nights, learning something of persistence and effort as I painstakingly first scrubbed the woodwork down with TSP, applied a primer coat of Killz and eventually went back with two coats of Graceful Willow.  Semi-gloss, of course, for the trim, and flat for the walls.

I'm ashamed to admit it now, but it was the first time in my life where I was truly having to work for something.  This house, whatever it was, would have to be made better by my work, my effort.  Some men seem born for such work, and embrace it wholly.  Not me.  From the first it seemed a burden, even a type of cursedness, as though God had relegated me to this new situation on account of my earlier failures and laziness.  But, I came to enjoy it and discovered in it some lessons about myself as well.

I learned, for one thing, the sense of honor a man can have in working for his family, I mean actually doing something practical and tangible that can house and benefit his spouse and children.  I remember many nights when the hours stretched on and on and my annoyance started to grow that I would focus on the quality of my work as a discipline of love.  I would paint the beautiful trim work with their hand-hewn accents and grooves with delicate care, and as I did so, I imagined doing my work with a chivalrous mind and devoted heart.  This hour I spent on the trim, I told myself, would be done for my wife, so that she could have and appreciate a bedroom that was carefully cut when it was painted.  Thankfully, I can look at the trim even now and see the care that was taken.  I am fairly surprised that I found calm enough within myself to do the job that well.

But, maybe more importantly, I learned that a man must work hard enough some times that he reaches a point of exhaustion and failure because that same exhaustion and failure can lead him beyond himself.  It was an unending task to paint this house, and even after I finished a room, it was clear that decades of use and deterioration were not going to be overcome by a few weeks of washing and painting.  No amount of effort would bring completion.  As I wrestled with the enormity of the task, I was driven to plead with God.  And I was humbled enough to ask for help from members of the church.  Sometimes help appeared even without my request, which always seemed like such obvious grace that I fought to hold back tears.

A friend of mine that I know speaks often of the value of work, how it gives a person self-confidence and worth.  Looking at the trim still shining from the lamp's light, I know he is right.  There is something of me in that work.  But, I'm aware enough to know that whatever improvements have been made to this home have come by more than just my American can-do attitude.  In the end, I was blessed with the awareness of family and community there to support me.  I can see it very tangibly in the bookshelves John Anderson masterfully built and installed in the corner of the room where I type.  And I can think of the folks who showed up when I had the sense to finally ask.  

Wes

The Elephant in the African Brush

With various stories floating around the last few weeks regarding President Obama's trip to South Africa, I've been reminiscing about our Wabash trip last fall.  I also discovered a poem I wrote on the plane ride back from South Africa.  I doubt much of it will translate, but hopefully the theme will come through.  I was inspired by the awesome experience of this elephant above appearing out of the brush in a wild game preserve.  This formidable animal came striding towards our open-top transport vehicle, stood in front of us a moment - just long enough to define our place.  Then the elephant moved on.  I was immediately struck by its silent determination and subtle yet profound strength.  It immediately became a symbol of the King and the Kingdom of God to me, something that would not be "denied or dismissed."  I was also impressed by the liquid sorrow of the elephant's eyes and the thousand-creased skin.  It's face seemed a representation of all the tragedy I had witnessed and heard of in the heart of South Africa.

The Bull Elephant in the African Brush

Out of the bush it strides,

     in mass and alone;

It twinges and stretches,

           its tusks turned and tilted,

           its almond eyes crying inside its

                 leather-patched, hardened hide.

The bull alerts itself and its predicament,

            fanning and fronting to its onward course,

    not to be deterred.

It strides past the seven-mile cesspool,

           walks its way through the saffron and dust

               of the stricken-street,

    Walks across the squalor and shambles,

        of zinc and tender dry

            sticks stacked as refuse and refuge,

    Across the further lands of Cape Town's mall,

      past the merriment and morbidity of the system

            the Xhosa serve,

      Of spinning wheel and

            hanging indulgence,

      of Waterfront and white.

It walks beyond the unspoken, unseen borders

      of every shantytown

          that mars and marks the African veld,

    Past the teeming tarnish,

The troubled and troubling

       Gehenna of Khayelitcha,

It sniffs the poisoned, polluted air -

      surveying, assessing.

      Wonders

         at its expanding and expansive tenement, baking

         in the valley beneath the dialectic

  of Stellenbosch,

    and soteriology, and sin,

Then turns its head

     towards its beckoning point,

     to its home-bound boundary

    Of which the whole creation waits and groans,

And strides again. 

Forward.

       Upward. 

       Onward.

It marches on past the tourists and the tribal troubadours,

    Past Zuma's cronies and capitalists,

    Past the Afrikaaners turned aristocrats.

    Past the twenty Rand trick,

         The sex-inducing blonde,

         The soul-worn umfundizi,

         The medicine man who stares out

              his Rustenburg shack

                  with his ailing eyes,

           Enchanting his inadequate summons of salve

     While his daughters' daughters wither and die.

It marches past the bishop holding his

    creamy, careful hands

     palm flat upon the screaming, scalding

       skin of another shanty girl -

     Riven and riddled by men and disease, raped by father

         and gold and market and

               the million greeds that yawn across the never closing market

           from corner to continent,

           from godless domains

               of powers and principalities

    Entrenched as postmodernism's modern gods.

Its eyes cry in silence - probing to the depths

    the degraded humiliation,

      the deplorable degrees of devastation,

And marches somehow onwards still. 

It pulses and pushes its Herculean

     Strength,

   not to be denied or dismissed,

     but persistent and proud.

So goes its will; its might,

    under the African sun and

     across the

         aching, ailing earth,

crying silently its

    Song,

Groaning for creation's renewal,

     which has been promised

        and foreseen.